Democrats need a message, not a policy platform
Democrats are in terrible shape. Republicans control all three branches of government in Washington, 34 of 50 governorships, and 68 of the 99 state legislative bodies.
As they plot a comeback, Democrats have one obvious asset: the reckless presidency of Donald Trump. That's not enough to close such a huge gap. And the battles that have started to rage inside the party over policies to promote and strategies to pursue are mostly missing the point.
The challenges are daunting:
• Picking up at least 24 seats in the House of Representatives in 2018 to recapture the majority they haven't held there since 2011.
• Holding their own in a Senate landscape that favors Republicans.
• Taking back five or six gubernatorial offices in key states like Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin (after winning New Jersey and Virginia this year).
• Capturing hundreds of Republican-held state legislative seats to set up redistricting advantages after the 2020 census.
• Making sure their process for selecting a 2020 presidential candidate is conducive to picking a winner.
They won't do these things with ideologically driven policies or a supposedly bold new agenda, but rather by genuinely connecting with voters; by making a credible case of understanding the frustrations and struggles of many Americans. That sounds simple, but Democrats have recently been failing that test in congressional and state elections, as they did in the 2016 presidential race.
It's instructive to look at the last time a political party was in such sorry shape. That was where Republicans found themselves in the postWatergate gloom of 1977, when Democrats controlled everything in Washington and in most places around the country.
Only four years later, Ronald Reagan was president. The Gipper's winning agenda in 1980 really was indistinguishable from Barry Goldwater's losing one 16 years earlier, except for the addition of a supply-side economics theory that didn't deliver on its promise of unprecedented economic growth and skyrocketing government revenue after cutting taxes.
But Reagan projected a can-do optimism that Americans welcomed after a series of economic, military and political shocks, tailoring his conservative message to appeal to the gas station attendant as much as the country club habitue. That year, Republicans won a majority in the Senate for the first time in more than a quarter-century and made major gains in statehouses.
Most other political-party comebacks also were marked not by some innovative policy agenda but by connective messages and powerful personalities like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Trump. It's not about ideology or 17-point policy prescriptions.
"In 2016, the problem was not about an agenda; we had that," said Paul Begala, a leading Democratic strategist and close associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton. "The problem was message."
Last month, Democratic congressional leaders put out a "Better Deal" agenda, a familiar litany of proposals like a higher minimum wage, lower drug prices, more job training and less corporate welfare. Bold or innovative it's not.
It does have its uses. "It's a good organizing tool for candidates to be more than just anti-Trump," said Stephanie Cutter, a former deputy campaign manager for Obama and a strategist in the successful 2006 Democratic campaign to win back a majority in the House.
Democratic leaders also hope the program will fend off the party's left wing and its fondness for litmus tests like the demand that all Democratic candidates embrace a single-payer health care plan. That would be a gift to Republican candidates, who are suffering from their party's failure and duplicity on health care and are eager to change the terms of public debate.
Similarly, former Democratic chairman Howard Dean wants to deny party support to any candidate who's not sufficiently pro-abortion. Others want uniformity on transgender soldiers, higher corporate tax rates, lower defense spending and impeaching Trump. It's a potential political death spiral of policy proposals that won't play well in closely fought battlegrounds that Democrats need to win.
On the presidential level, the most critical point is that it's much too early to handicap potential candidates. It was far from obvious in 1989 that Clinton would prevail three years later; the same goes for Obama in 2005 or Trump in 2013. There will be a slew of Democratic contenders to help the party field-test its message.
The experiment will be successful if it yields a message and messenger that best counter the failings of Trump, if he's still in office: Someone who knows about governing without appearing to be elitist, who can return dignity to the White House but is also approachable, is persuasive in articulating Democratic themes like the dangers of income inequality and wage stagnation, and just might be able to create some bipartisan consensus.
Related, and more pressing now, is how well Democrats fare in the 36 gubernatorial contests and thousands of state legislative races next year, where Republicans currently hold a 3,034-to-2,317 advantage.
State governments also often serve as farm clubs to develop candidates for higher office and national prominence. Before they start quarreling about policy papers, Democrats need to restock their Triple-A teams.